‘What would happen if your city, in the name of progress, started giving poorer residents vouchers for landline telephones rather than smartphones? Or if, rather than stocking public libraries with computers, so that people could write emails, your city installed fax machines?’

‘Like many scholars of modernism, I’m often asked two questions: What is modernism? And why is modernist studies, it seems, all the rage right now? I don’t have a good, succinct answer to either question — and I’ve no doubt frustrated plenty of friends because of that — but the reasons why I don’t are pretty telling.’

From the comments:

‘The most useful definition of modernist fiction I’ve encountered comes from Brian McHale’s Postmodernist Fiction. He says modernist fiction tends to “foreground epistemological questions” such as “How can I interpret the world I’m part of? What is there to be known?Who knows it? What are the limits of that knowledge?” In contrast, postmodernist fiction tends to “foreground ontological questions” such as “What is a world? What kinds of worlds are there and how are they constituted? What happens when…boundaries between worlds are violated?’

‘There is no morality in art. There is morality in religion; there are philosophical objectives embedded in politics. The two are intertwined in a society and reflected in its art. When you sever art from its cultural moorings and make “newness” the overriding criterion by which the merits of a work are judged, then anything is possible. This results in crap. Not always’

James Joyce, Virginia Woolf, Ezra Pound, the Bauhaus, the imagists, the futurists etc. Some of those influences have morphed into post-modernism or where such currents have flowed and keep flowing.

Lileks’ take:

‘The primary urge of the revolutionary and the modernist and the adolescent: impatience.’

So, do we aim for maturity? Reverence? Good old Longfellow?

Food for thought. Science, technology, mathematics are doing quite fine, and moving ahead, but what about the humanities?

Apparently, not all ‘individual humans’ as defined by Western intellectual traditions and Western secular humanists/idealists see themselves as Westerners do.

In spite of the last American administration, not everyone wants to be a member of a global Anglo-capitalist trading and legal order, forced to create some kind of functioning Western-style democracy, backed by American military power and guided no doubt, by some Christian belief from afar. Nor do many people perhaps even want a Westphalian state (which means having to keep-up appearances at NATO gatherings and maintain some basic founding documents/Constitution and a minimal standing army).

In spite of the current American administration, not everyone wants to join into a state of perpetual progressive protest and activism, living under ever-growing social-democratic bureaucratic States promising their own visions of the ideal society, justifying some violence and righteous revolutionary activity in the process, exerting their will through international institutions, looking for human rights and new classes of victims.

Not everyone prefers such ideals, say, over immediate relief, money, advantage, and leverage in their relations with American interests.

—

There are many other models which are NOT a part of the traditions and institutions to which I am responsible, from the old Persian empire to the modern Islamic/Islamist hybrid State (or as many would prefer, a functioning, secure Islamic order like the good ol’ days).

From the ancient Han Chinese core/Mandarin system to the big-chief tribal setup found in various regions of what we’re calling the modern world.

On that note: When ISIS holds territory, ISIS is able to amplify its reach and scope. Some ISIS folks apparently want virgins and/or slaves, guns, blood and power. Others have a slightly bigger picture in mind, settling for a brutal enforcement regime in Raqqa…for now.

I have some concern for these lower risk, higher consequence events happening where I live, and I tend to favor cold-eyed realist leaders who will focus on such threats enough to balance my/your/our freedoms with a lighter hand.

In fact, some consideration of the above is one the main reasons on which I consider my vote, even for the two unpleasant choices currently facing me and you (candidates who both seem to consistently put themselves, and their images of themselves, above most other considerations…most of the time).

‘Deal opponents say their focus now is to expose Iran’s bad behavior and risks for business, and to minimize Iran’s economic gains so the regime can’t use new trade and investment to spend more money on terrorist activities, ballistic missiles, wars in Syria and Yemen and repression at home. Once a new U.S. administration is inaugurated, getting a better and broader deal is still possible, they insist: if Iran wants access to the U.S. financial system, for example, it should agree to end financing for terror groups like Hezbollah, Dubowitz says.’

‘When it was announced a year ago, the Iran nuclear deal stoked intense debate among pundits and policymakers about whether it would accomplish its core purpose: keep Iran from developing nuclear weapons. But in recent months, the criticism has shifted. As the sanctions unwind, observers have grown more concerned about whether Iran is getting the economic relief it had expected and how the unwinding might affect the remaining bans on Iran.’

‘Therein lies the central tension of Speak, Memory. Its prose is meticulous, suggesting memory as an exercise in exacting dictation from an omniscient oracle, yet its message points to memory as mutable, prone to the passage of time and the vagaries of imagination’

“Nabokov in America” is rewarding on all counts, as biography, as photo album (there are many pictures of people, Western landscapes and motels) and as appreciative criticism. Not least, Roper even avoids the arch style so often adopted by critics faintly trying to emulate their inimitable subject.’

What’s more American than an exiled member of the Russian aristocracy intimately making his way into the English language and peering out from a thousand Motor Lodges?

A little bit about politics and also the politics amidst fellow writers and critics:

‘…when in doubt, I always follow the simple method of choosing that line of conduct which may be the most displeasing to the Reds and the Russells.’

and:

‘Who’s in, who’s out, and where are the snows of yesteryear. All very amusing. I am a little sorry to be left out. Nobody can decide if I am a middle-aged American writer or an old Russian writer—or an ageless international freak.’

On his professional collection of butterflies:

‘The pleasures and rewards of literary inspiration are nothing beside the rapture of discovering a new organ under the microscope or an undescribed species on a mountainside in Iran or Peru. It is not improbable that had there been no revolution in Russia, I would have devoted myself entirely to lepidopterology and never written any novels at all.’

Let’s not forget the victims of crime, and that in bad neighborhoods, it’s usually just a matter of time before something bad happens to you (even if you know people, I’m guessing):

‘Mac Donald gives voice to the many residents of high-crime neighborhoods who want proactive policing.’

If you’re going to focus on pain and injustice, difficult as it is, it’s probably best to keep a level head, and provide irrefutable evidence of the wrongs, nailing them to a post in public view. Policing can be a risky business which deals with a violent subset of the population most of the time. Knowledge of facts and the law are probably your best allies.

Passionate intensity and endless protest can obviously muddy the waters, erasing the line between violent criminals and regular folks on the street. Ultimately, this weakens whatever trust is there between the police, the neighborhood, and more importantly, all of civil society (the moral concern and inclusion into civil society [freedoms and responsibilities] that can lift people up and keep them striving for something better).

Crime is damaging, demoralizing, and dangerous. Most criminals usually don’t care about the damage they’re doing…

In this blog’s view: It’s not that the social sciences don’t offer knowledge, insight and relief to people, it’s that the knowledge can be mistaken, and their use soon deployed in a system of incentives by policy advocates, politicians and people on the public take…with motivations of their own.

Proper context is key.

There aren’t many good answers to such tough problems, but tough, unsentimental thinking can often help the most; usually much more than proclamations coming from all the ‘right’ media outlets, suburbs and academia…declaring what the latest discoveries are and where people heads and hearts ought to be.

Theodore Dalrymple (pseudonym) worked in Britain as a prison doctor/psychiatrist, and explains his thinking about how to properly treat people as subjects responding to their environments and the incentives presented before them:

‘Bromwich twice quotes Burke’s deceptively simple political creed, that “the principles of true politicks are those of morality enlarged, and I neither now do nor every will admit of any other.” This biography can be viewed as a careful unpacking of the varying implications of that stance, as Burke both adhered to it, and attained a deeper understanding of its meaning, over the course of his career in public life.’

Here’s a link to Michael Sandel at Harvard’s lecture courses on ‘Justice’. I’ve made it through his presentation of Robert Nozick, Locke, and Kant so far.